By Robert Frost (1916)
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.
The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ‘Whither?’
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
Analysis
“Reluctance” honors the impulse to resist closure — love or season should not end without protest. The poem’s steady cadences mimic a return walk through winter fields, while the final stanza bluntly calls acceptance a kind of “treason.”
Frost does not resolve the argument between feeling and reason; he measures it, granting dignity to refusal even as the form acknowledges inevitability.